disaster capitalism

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, December 29, 2015

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• These Will Be The Biggest Climate Fights Of 2016 - By Natasha Geiling, Think Progress, December 23, 2015
• What this California department’s racist emails could mean for the communities it’s supposed to protect - By Aura Bogado, Grist, December 23, 2015
• Ailing, Angry Nuclear-Weapons Workers Fight for Compensation - By Jim Morris and Jamie Smith Hopkins, TruthOut, December 22, 2015
• Whistleblower Speaks Out Against USDA, Corruption and Systemic Pesticides - By Maryam Henein, TruthOut, December 22, 2015
• The Empire Strikes Back: the Return of the WTO - By Polly Jones, CounterPunch, December 14, 2015

Ongoing Mobilizations:

• Flush the TPP - Spring 2016: | #FlushtheTPP
• Railcon15 - Next Conference TBA | #Railcon15

COP21 and Paris:

• Climate Terror From Paris Could Endure for Generations - By Patrick Bond, CounterPunch, December 25, 2015
• Ground zero of climate change - By Tarique Niazi, Climate and Capitalism, December 23, 2015
• The Climate Movement is Dead: A Report Back from COP21 - By Ducky Slowcode, Medium, December 21, 2015
• This Climate Solution Could Cool the Planet and Feed the World - By Kiss The Ground, EcoWatch, December 21, 2015
• Talks in the city of light generate more heat - By Kevin Anderson, Nature, December 21, 2015
• And the Climate Pretender Award Goes To… - By Sandra Steingraber, Readers' Supported News, December 20, 2015
• Paris Was Just a Way Station in the Climate Change Fight - By Antonia Juhasz, Newsweek, December 18, 2015
• The problem with REDD+ - By Vijay Kolinjivadi, Uneven Earth, December 17, 2015

The Thin Green Line:

• In Ohio, Communities Work to Defend Themselves Against Fossil Fuel Industry - By Simon Davis-Cohen, TruthOut, December 27, 2015
• Forest Service Pushes for Coal Mining on Protected Lands in Colorado - By Eric Galatas, Public News Service, December 24, 2015
• Labor's Positive Progress - By Jay Youngdahl and Darwin BondGraham, East Bay Express, December 23, 2015
• It's Time for Jerry Brown to Break His Silence on Coal - By Robert Gammon, East Bay Express, December 23, 2015
• Paul Ryan Just Made The Case For Why Lifting The Oil Export Ban Is Really Bad - By Samantha Page, Think Progress, December 22, 2015

Bread and Roses:

• Food Sovereignty: This is What Anarchy Looks Like - By Boyan Atzev, Popular Resistance, December 27, 2015
• #ENDWTO: Developing Countries return Empty Handed from WTO’s Nairobi Ministerial - By Afsar Jafri, Focus on the Global South, December 26, 2015
• Biting the Hands That Feed: New York's Immigrant Farmworkers Face Appalling Treatment - By Leanne Tory-Murphy, TruthOut, December 22, 2015
• G7’s ‘New Alliance’ deal is failing farmers in Africa - By Aisha Dodwell, New Internationalist, December 22, 2015
• Standards without enforcement are nothing more than empty promises to workers, consumers alike… - By staff, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, December 22, 2015

An Injury to One is an Injury to All:

• SFMTA workers struggle to meet basic needs - By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, San Francisco Examiner, December 28, 2015
• Black lung: Queensland underground coal mines warned to reduce dust levels below safety standards - By Matt Peacock, Austalian Broadcasting Company, December 23, 2015; [related] Coalminers call for inquiry after return of black lung disease in Queensland - By Australian Associated Press, The Guardian, December 23, 2015
• OSHA Finds $12,000 Worth of Citations at Hotel Where Workers Report Dealing with Blood, Needles - By S E Smith, In These Times, December 23, 2015
• Dr says heavy metal poisoning from Tolukuma mine causing genocide - By Gloria Bauai, Post Courior, December 22, 2015
• Golden Misabiko on the Exploitation of Uranium in Congo - By Gideon Gottfried, TruthOut, December 22, 2015
• China’s Latest Crackdown on Workers Is Unprecedented - By Michelle Chen, The Nation, December 18, 2015; [related] Global unions demand release of Chinese labour activists - By Staff, IndustriAll, December 21, 2015
• Northeast China sees two coal mine disasters in two days - By Staff, China Labor Bulletin, December 18, 2015
• The Black Dust You Breathe on BART - By Julia Carrie Wong, San Francisco Weekly, December 16, 2015

Disaster Capitalism:

• FOIA Request Shows Govt Lied About Lead in Water - By Andrew Emett, Earth First! Journal, December 28, 2015
• ‘Nuclear Gypsies’ Risk Their Lives to Clean Up Fukushima - By Cole Mellino, EcoWatch, December 28, 2015
• Alabama Governor Uses BP Spill Money To Fix Up A Second Mansion For Himself - By Alice Ollstein, Think Progress, December 27, 2015
• Wrong track: Authorities lack manpower to inspect rail lines - By Rick Rouan and Laura Arenschield, Columbus Dispatch, December 22, 2015
• What Went Wrong at Porter Ranch? - By Gene Maddaus, LA Weekly, December 22, 2015
• Proof that Bhopal Gas is Now Claiming its Third Generation of Victims - By Rakesh Dixit, The Wire, December 8, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Smyth: B.C. Liberals deny unions an exclusive deal for Site C megaproject - By Michael Smyth, The Province, December 24, 2015
• Opec faces a mortal threat from electric cars - By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, December 23, 2015
• Pemex oil production hampered by accidents, budget cuts - By Bloomberg, FuelFix, December 23, 2015
• Rig count tumbles three as oil prices refuse to budge - By Rhiannon Meyers, FuelFix, December 23, 2015
• Study shows 96% of some mining jobs can be automated - By Frik Els, Mining.Com, December 22, 2015
• Dresser-Rand plans to shutter plant, lay off 72 workers - By Rhiannon Meyers, FuelFix, December 21, 2015
• Mass Layoffs in China’s Coal Country Threaten Unrest - By Jane Perlez and Yufan Huang, New York Times, December 16, 2015

Just Transition:

• Time To Transition To 100% Clean Energy: The Wind Is Now At Our Backs - By Mark Ruffalo, Popular Resistance, December 22, 2015
• Can coal-hungry Appalachia take any lessons from Australia’s new solar farm? - By Clayton Aldern, Grist, December 21, 2015
• Australia’s powerful web of grassroots climate resistance - By Nicola Paris, Waging Nonviolence, December 17, 2015
• Earth to Labor: Dispatches from the Climate Battleground - By Sean Sweeney, New Labor Forum, December 17, 2015

Other News:

• 10 Incredible Moments in 2015: A Landmark Year in Climate Action - By May Boeve, EcoWatch, December 26, 2015
• How Fossil Fuel Divestment Can Rewrite the Climate Narrative - By Geoffrey Supran, Common Dreams, December 23, 2015
• Argentines March to Defend Workers Against Macri's Pro-Business Policies - By Staff, Telesur TV, December 22, 2015
• Christmas at the Mines - By Chris Mullins, The Thoughtful Coal Miner, December 22, 2015
• Inspection of Vast Federal Biological Collections Slated - By Kirsten Stade, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, December 22, 2015
• When the Workers Become the Owners: Taking the Co-op Movement to the Next Level - By Brian Van Slyke, TruthOut, December 21, 2015
• Starbucks' Deforestation-Free Pledge Is a Total Joke - By Elliott Negin, Alternet, December 18, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW. Please send suggested news items to include in this series to euc [at] iww.org.

By Rich Hutchings and Marina La Salle - Department of Anthropology, Vancouver Island University, and Institute for Critical Heritage and Tourism, British Columbia, Canada, September 3, 2015

Archaeology is a form of disaster capitalism, characterized by specialist managers whose function is the clearance of Indigenous heritage from the landscape,making way for economic development. When presented with this critique, archaeologists respond strongly and emotionally, defending archaeology. Anger emanates from and revolves around the assertion that archaeologists are not just complicit in bu tintegral to the destruction of the very heritage they claim to protect. In what we believe is an act of philosophical and economic self-preservation, mainstream archaeologists actively forget the relationship between archaeology, violence, and the global heritage crisis. Securely defended by its practitioners, archaeology therefore re-mains an imperial force grounded in the ideology of growth, development, and progress.

Read the report (PDF).

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, September 3, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Ten years ago, between August 23-31, Hurricane Katrina overran the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, destroying major portions of the city, killing at least 1245 people. The destruction and death disproportionately affected the poor, mostly nonwhite, working class people and neighborhoods of New Orleans, and the response by the capitalist class and every government from the local municipal authorities to the State of Louisiana to the United States, was to render aid to the mostly white employing class while letting the working class suffer. Law enforcement and the capitalist, in an orgy of racism and class bias, displayed blatant double standards, greatly exaggerating the actions of black survivors, labeling their actions as "violent", "looting", and "thuggish" while ignoring at least as serious actions by white survivors. Then, they used the disaster to bust unions, privatize public institutions (including the public school system), and shred environmental laws, so they could remake New Orleans into a hyper capitalist mecca. Ten years later, the devastation of Katrina is still wreaking havoc on the 99%, however, as a result, broad based, intersectional working class resistance has arisen among them and they are fighting back. A good portion of the resistance is working under the banner of #GulfSouthRising and Katrina Truth. Following are just some of their stories:

• Amid Katrina Commemoration Spectacle, a Southern Freedom Movement Takes Shape - By Anna Simonton, TruthOut, September 1, 2015
• Bush Administration Exemption Allowed Contractors To Steal Wages From Katrina Reconstruction Workers - By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, Think Progress, August 31, 2015
• Dodging potholes in New Orleans: 10 years after Katrina - By Hannah Bonne, RoarMag, August 31, 2015
• Social Justice and Climate Justice Movements Merge in New Orleans 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina - By Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog, August 31, 2015
• Still left behind in the new New Orleans - Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky interviewed by Elizabeth Schulte, Socialist Worker, August 31, 2015
• Gulf South Rising Remembers Katrina, Builds Campaign - By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance, August 30, 2015
• How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans - By Thomas Jessen Adams, Jacobin, August 29, 2015
• These New Orleans Residents Are Still Trying To Go Home - By Bryce Covert, Think Progress, August 29, 2015
• Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina - By Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, August 28, 2015
• Katrina Plus Ten: Climate Justice in Action - By Scott Parkin, CounterPunch, August 28, 2015
• Shock Doctrine: A Look at the Mass Privatization of NOLA Schools in Storm’s Wake & Its Effects Today - Wendell Pierce and Gary Rivlin interviewed by Juan González and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, August 28, 2015
• Ten years on: Katrina, militarisation and climate change - By Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes, Open Democracy, August 28, 2015
• Was the Katrina Oil Spill Disaster a Harbinger for the Atlantic Coast? - By Sue Sturgis, Facing South, August 28, 2015
• Still Waiting for Help: Lessons of Hurricane Katrina on Poverty - By Laura Lein, The Conversation, August 27, 2015
• A Decade After Katrina, RNs Reflect on What We’ve Learned and Refuse to Learn - By Staff, National Nurses United, August 26, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW

By Philippa de Boissière, et. al. - The Democracy Center, November 2014

Multinational corporations are relentlessly expanding their operations into ever more vulnerable and remote regions of the planet. As they do so they both drive the climate crisis and exacerbate its impacts. They bear responsibility for a global crisis which affects us all, and they bring social and environmental destruction to the local communities where they operate. A further legacy of their oil drilling, industrial mining and mega hydroelectric projects is the erosion of those communities’ resilience just as the impacts of climate change begin to take effect. These same multinationals are also the biggest barrier to meaningful action on climate change, blocking urgently needed regulations and genuine transformational solutions.

Despite this, corporations are gaining increasing access to climate policy-making spaces, both at national and international level, allowing them to put forward their own so-called ‘solutions’. But their market-based techno-fixes are not aimed at tack-ling the crisis at all. Rather, they allow the biggest polluters to line their pockets with public money while continuing with business as usual. Denouncing the connections between corporations and our decision makers, and delegitimising their seat at the table, is crucial if we are to chart a different course.

At the UN climate talks (the UNFCCC), twenty years of negotiating have failed to solve the crisis. This is due, in large part, to the corporate capture of national- level government policy and of the UN process itself. In 2014 negotiators will meet in Peru at the heart of one of the world’s regions most vulnerable to climate change and already one of the hardest hit. In the Amazon and the Andes forests are being destroyed, glaciers are melting and climate patterns are changing at an alarming pace. Communities living in these regions are seeing their natural support systems and means of survival irreversibly damaged.

Read the report (PDF).

By Joseph E. Aldy - Common Resources, August 22, 2014

On April 20, 2010, the Transocean Deepwater Horizon suffered a catastrophic blowout while drilling in a BP lease in the Gulf of Mexico’s Macondo Prospect. This accident resulted in the largest oil spill in US history and an unprecedented spill response effort. Due to the ongoing spill and concerns about the safety of offshore oil drilling, the US Department of the Interior suspended offshore deep water oil and gas drilling operations on May 27, 2010, in what became known as the offshore drilling moratorium. The media portrayed the impacts of these events on local employment, with images of closed fisheries, idle rigs, as well as boats skimming oil and workers cleaning oiled beaches.

In a new RFF discussion paper, “The Labor Market Impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Moratorium,” I estimate and examine the net impact of the oil spill, the drilling moratorium, and spill response on employment and wages in the Gulf Coast. The spill and moratorium represented unexpected events in the region, and the resulting economic impacts varied within and among the Gulf states. Coastal counties and parishes were expected to bear the vast majority of the burden of these two events, while inland areas were expected to be largely unaffected. The moratorium was expected to affect Louisiana—with significant support of the offshore drilling industry—but not, for example, Florida, which had no active drilling off of its coastline. Beyond the economic impacts, the timing and magnitude of the spill response varied across the states over the course of the spill as well.

Despite predictions of major job losses in Louisiana resulting from these events, I find that the most oil-intensive parishes in Louisiana experienced a net increase in employment and wages. In contrast, Gulf Coast Florida counties south of the Panhandle experienced a decline in employment. Analysis of the number of business establishments, worker migration, accommodations industry employment and wages, sales tax data, and commercial air arrivals likewise show positive economic activity impacts in the oil-intensive coastal parishes of Louisiana and reduced economic activity along the non-Panhandle Florida Gulf Coast. The billions of dollars of spill response and clean-up mobilized over the course of the spring and summer of 2010 positively impacted economic activity, similar to the effect of fiscal stimulus. The geographic variation in labor market impacts reflects the focus of spill response efforts in Louisiana and the absence of oil and thus spill response along the Gulf coast of Florida south of the Panhandle.

Read the report (PDF).

By staff - Global Justice Ecology Project, May 13, 2014

There is much being said and written today about how to effectively address the oncoming catastrophe of climate change, which is already, for many, tragically real. There is a crucial and obvious need for a powerful global movement to tackle the climate crisis. But this movement will not be based on reform.

Capitalism and the markets have led us to the brink of the abyss. They will not provide our parachute. The system cannot be reformed. It must be transformed. The more we understand how the roots of the many issues we are fighting are intertwined, the better we can cooperate to change the system driving them. In diversity is strength, as any ecologist understands, and our movements for change are no exception.

Global Justice Ecology Project is publishing The Green Shock Doctrine as a means to help expose and examine the deeper issues behind the climate crisis and their links to many of the other crises we are facing. In doing so, we hope to help advance the effort to transform the global system driving climate catastrophe.

Read the report (PDF).

Greg Palast and Robert Bryce interviewed by Amy Goodman - Democracy Now, May 16, 2006

[in 2001] California was plunged into an unprecedented energy crisis. Rolling blackouts shut down parts of the state. Power bills soared. It turned out that at the center of the crisis was Enron — although the company’s role wasn’t fully understood at the time. We play excerpts of audiotapes that proved Enron asked power companies to take plants offline at the height of the California energy crisis–in order to make more money.

AMY GOODMAN: In California, the state’s former governor Gray Davis praised the jury for convicting Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. David said, quote, "Given the way Enron ripped off California, I think the jury did an excellent job. I take some solace in the fact that Lay and Skilling be will send some time in prison," he said. Six years ago, California was plunged into an unprecedented energy crisis, rolling blackouts shut down parts of the state, power bills soared. It turned out that at the center of the crisis was Enron, although the company’s role wasn’t fully understood at the time. Two years ago, lawyers involved in a lawsuit in Washington state obtained audio tapes that proved Enron asked power companies to take plants offline at the height of the California energy crisis, in order to make more money. In one taped phone call, an Enron employee celebrated the fact that a massive forest fire had shut down a transmission line carrying energy into California, causing the price of energy to rise.

By Larry Everest - Z Magazine, April 2001

By Jessie Muldoon and Todd Chretien - International Socialist Review, February-March 2001

THE LIGHTS are out in California. Rolling blackouts have cut electricity to millions. Only this time, it's not the San Andreas Fault that's to blame. It's the free market.

A year ago, electricity cost roughly 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour on the wholesale market. Today, that same amount costs upward of 40 cents. Why? Back in 1996, energy companies and big businesses showered millions of dollars on California politicians, convincing them to vote unanimously to "deregulate" the publicly owned and managed state electrical utility system. The state would no longer set prices and supervise the industry. In exchange, the energy companies promised Californians lower prices and cleaner power brought on by free-market competition.

Instead, a handful of energy profiteers have made a killing, while millions of Californians suffer higher rates and the harmful effects of power outages. The results of the power crunch have been devastating to ordinary people. Nathaniel Goodwin, who is 73, has emphysema and needs an electrical oxygen concentrator to breathe. As rolling blackouts spread across California, he stocked up on crackers and peanut butter, arranged for a battery-powered backup, and hoped for the best. "I live by myself and I've got to have my oxygen," he told a reporter.¹

"We've got elderly folks with arthritis who have to have heat. Many of them have medical devices they need to live and no one knows what will happen when the electricity is turned off," said Marie Harrison, a community leader in the Bay View Hunters Point district of San Francisco, which is predominantly Black.²

The utility companies claim that hospitals and fire stations will not be affected by the blackouts, but two hospitals--Valley Convalescent Hospital in Watsonville and Community Medical Centers in Fresno--suffered outages. Across the state, workers are paying the price for deregulation. California Steel Industries of Fontana, the largest steel plant on the West Coast, sent 400 workers home without pay because of skyrocketing electrical costs. The Miller Brewing Company plant in Irwindale laid off its whole workforce for a week without pay.3

Schools have lost power or have been forced to cut back on heat, leaving tens of thousands of children shivering in the dark. Contrary to popular belief, temperatures during California winters often hover between 40 and 50 degrees, and few buildings have proper insulation. Meanwhile, the crisis shut down some of California's biggest oil refineries, which could quickly lead to a substantial hike in prices at the pumps. A dairy farmer put it this way: "This problem has the potential to be substantially more devastating than any earthquake we've seen."4

One economist estimated that the state lost $1.7 billion in wages, sales, and productivity in just one week of blackouts.5 And there is no end in sight. The Independent System Operator (ISO), the state-appointed agency that controls the California power grid, warned that Californians should get used to rolling blackouts for at least the next two years.6

This article explores how deregulation and the free market are behind the crisis, and why we should fight for public power as a solution.